About

Evil Nestle refers to memes made about the food company Nestle and its former CEO's stance on water, who infamously argued that the position that the belief "water is a human right" is an "extreme" view. Nestle has also been accused of taking water from impoverished areas and selling their water back to them at a high price. While the scandal surrounding the CEO's quote is over a decade old, jokes about Nestle became a hot topic for memes on Reddit in July of 2019.

Origin

In the 2005 documentary We Feed the World, Nestle's then-CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is recorded saying:^[1]

“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value."

This led to the idea that the Nestle CEO said "water is not a human right," which Snopes rated as "Mixture" in terms of truthfulness. Snopes also noted that Nestle, "like other giant water bottlers, sources its product for pennies on the dollar, often in locations where water resources are scarce or challenged." Snopes went on to say, "Fueling the controversy were instances in which large corporations privatized the water supplies of communities forced to sell or lease the resource due to economic hardship, only to raise the water rates of local residents to prices higher than many could afford, essentially cutting them off from their own resource."

Spread

On July 11th, 2019, Redditor TriggerOnTheTrey^[2] posted a Lisa Simpson's Presentation meme going over the various ills of Nestle, gaining over 10,000 points (shown below).

The post led others to post about how Nestle is evil or otherwise terrible. Popular examples include a post by kayneshaw^[3] that gained over 31,000 points (shown below, left). User @sajjad_wasti^[4] made a post joking that the growing anti-Nestle memes would soon overtake the trending Storm Area 51 memes, gaining over 24,000 points (shown below, right). Jokes were inquired about on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[5] and compiled on Memebase.^[6]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References